Gaurav Mantri's Personal Blog.

Windows Azure Cloud Services, Extensions and Service Management API – Fun with Remote Desktop

I want you to try something for me (pretty please with cherry on top ). Fire up Visual Studio, create a simple Windows Azure Cloud Service and then without making any changes just publish that service. When you publish the service, DO NOT ENABLE REMOTE DESKTOP! Once the service is deployed, … [Read more...]

Introducing Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .Net

Today Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .Net. You can read more about the announcement in Scott Guthrie’s blog post here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/30/announcing-the-release-of-windows-azure-sdk-2-0-for-net.aspx. In this blog post, we’ll cover … [Read more...]

Windows Azure Primer–Basics

There’re many articles which cover Windows Azure and it’s functionality in great details however I could not find much information when it comes to novice users (or may be I need to brush up on my searching skills ). Anyways, through these series of blog posts I will try and explain Windows Azure as … [Read more...]

Moving On – Goodbye Cerebrata, Hello Cynapta!

Today’s my last day at Cerebrata. Wow!!! It has been an incredible journey for the last 5 years. I vividly remember when around the same time 5 years ago, I told my team in the US about my decision to move back to India to “do my own thing”. I was not 100% sure what I’ll be doing; there was no … [Read more...]

Uploading Large Files in Windows Azure Blob Storage Using Shared Access Signature, HTML, and JavaScript

In my last post I talked about Shared Access Signature feature of Windows Azure Storage. You can read that post here: https://gauravmantri.com/2013/02/13/revisiting-windows-azure-shared-access-signature/. In this post we’ll put that to some practical use :). One thing I wanted to accomplish … [Read more...]

Revisiting Windows Azure Shared Access Signature

In this blog post, we’ll talk about Shared Access Signature (SAS) functionality in Windows Azure. Steve Marx (@smarx) wrote excellent blog posts on the same subject a few years ago which you can read here: http://blog.smarx.com/posts/shared-access-signatures-are-easy-these-days, … [Read more...]

Workaround for IIS Express Crashing When Running Windows Azure Cloud Service Web Role with Multiple Instances in Windows Azure SDK 1.8 Compute Emulator

I ran into this weird issue when developing a very simple Windows Azure Cloud Service Web Role using Windows Azure SDK 1.8. I started off with a basic ASP.Net MVC 4 Web Role with no changes whatsoever. When I tried to debug it with just one instance running, everything worked great. The moment I … [Read more...]

Windows Azure Access Control Service, Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012: Setting Up Development Environment – Oh My!

Today I started playing with Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) and ran into some issues while making a simple application based on the guide here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/access-control/. I had to search for a number of things on the Internet to finally … [Read more...]

Building a Simple Task Scheduler in Windows Azure

Often times we need to execute certain tasks repeatedly. In this blog post, we will talk about building a simple task scheduler in Windows Azure. We’ll actually develop a simple task scheduler which will run in a Windows Azure Worker Role. We’ll also discuss some other alternatives available to us … [Read more...]

Cerebrata Story – Customer Service

In this blog post, I will share our experience regarding the most important aspect of running a company – customer service. To me, nothing is more important for a company than to providing the best possible customer service. This alone makes or breaks a company. As a side note, personally I don’t … [Read more...]